The Yellowjackets are in pain, hallucinating, and becoming increasingly interested in blood sacrifice. We spoke to therapists and they have advice.
Nobody on the “yellow vests” agrees.
It sounds harsh, but who would expect teenage plane crash survivors left in the desert to do well? Those who didn’t die resorted to hunting and eating their own teammates – and that’s exactly what we know so far.
When someone experiences a shock, like a plane crash, the body goes into survival mode, clinical psychologist Dr Robin Gibbs told IndieWire. The “thinking brain”, which handles problem solving and judgment, “goes offline”.
“It’s kind of like the old story of mothers being able to lift a car if their child is stuck under it,” she said. “You don’t think your way through this; that other part of the brain kind of takes over.
After the crash, the “Yellowjackets” characters don’t really understand what happened to them because it continues. It’s one shock after another, each stressor piling on top of the last. With horrific incidents in quick succession, Gibbs said, the emotions associated with these events don’t necessarily go away. They are stored elsewhere in the mind, leading to “numbness and difficulty making decisions, or behaving in typically rational ways”.
As the Yellowjackets continue to face incredibly difficult situations, mental health therapist Jayta Szpitalak said the nature of their fears and anxieties are changing — and becoming harder to deal with through traditional therapy techniques.
“It really manifests differently in your brain,” she told IndieWire. “When you have thought-based anxieties, it’s called top-down, and it’s really effective with psychotherapy. You can rationalize, and logic appeals to that type of anxiety. But when you feel anxiety following a traumatic event, it is more based on fear. In fact, you do not process the information, cerebrally. You do not intellectualize it.
Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) with the corpse of Jackie (Ella Purnell) in “Yellow Vests”
Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME
With most television shows, viewers can grasp a character’s true nature to the point where they are comfortable expressing how someone would or should behave. ‘They wouldn’t do that’ or someone acting ‘out of character’ are phrases born of familiarity and poise, but ‘Yellow Vests’ is the rare sight to offer neither. ‘other. Does adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) act by or In character when she seduces her husband in the workshop of the man she murdered? Is the teenager Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) hanging around with a corpse as unbalanced as her teammates think? Are any of them even the real Shauna, or did that person figuratively die in the accident – effectively disappearing after Episode 1?
“If you think of someone who had to endure that kind of prolonged stress, often people don’t,” said Gibbs, who specializes in trauma. “People who have some kind of internal capacity (or) resources that allow them to cope and continue to survive.”
As IndieWire’s Ben Travers noted in his review of Season 2, “Yellowjackets” really delves into hallucinations – an age-old TV tradition of visual storytelling, but in this case also potentially as a means of illustrating deterioration. mental states of the characters. In real life, Gibbs said the hallucination is symptomatic of “stress beyond what anyone can handle,” especially for teenagers in the wild, which Szpitalak says could also come from depression and grief.
“Starvation wreaks havoc on psychological functioning,” Gibbs noted, pointing to Season 2’s ongoing storyline of food stores running low. “(Hallucination) is a technique, I’m sure, for the show, but it’s really a way of expressing what happens in these extreme circumstances.”
Sam McMillen, a psychiatry resident at Harvard University, explained that hallucinations appear in various psychotic disorders, but could also be a form of hypervigilance – constantly perceiving security threats based on previous experience (often seen in veterans).
“What would be clinically addressed would be: what puts them in a state where they don’t feel safe or feel hypervigilant against past threats or things that represent past threats?” he said. “You might perceive a wolf as a bizarre hallucination of an animal, but if it represents feeling targeted or represents something violent or aggressive, it could suggest that it’s something you feel emotionally unstable – like you need to be prepared for this aggression to happen again.
Tawny Cypress in the “yellow vests”
Colin Bentley/SHOWTIME
Season 2 alone heralded the arrival of the savage winter, with Jackie’s (Ella Purnell) corpse frozen because she can’t be buried in the frozen ground. As the characters focus solely on survival – temporarily abandoning all rescue efforts just so they can live until spring – they find unique ways to cope. Misty (Samantha Hanratty) makes a new friend; Shauna talks to Jackie’s body and puts on makeup; Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) sleepwalks at night; and many others casually approve of Lottie’s (Courtney Eaton) growing interest in blood sacrifice.
“Sometimes if you’re faced with such an extreme traumatic event, your mind can absolutely try to justify it to you in incredible ways,” Szpitalak said. “You can manifest a whole backstory to try to make yourself comfortable… when people lie a lot, they can start believing their lies – it’s similar to that. If you’re going through a traumatic event and it’s so extreme…you fill in the gaps in that story to feel better.
Not only are the girls starving and malnourished, but the basic uncertainty of their daily lives also alters bodily systems. “Even the hardiest and healthiest of us,” Gibbs said, like these young athletes, can’t live that way.
Over the course of the series, more and more characters seem to seek solace in Lottie’s rituals, which begin to reflect religious or spiritual practices (and appear in the cult she leads as an adult).
“It seems to be born out of a need for hope,” Szpitalak said. “When you feel a sense of loss and you don’t have answers…creating rituals and creating that community can help you make sense of the meaningless situation.”
McMillen agreed, noting that traumatic experiences are, at their core, unexpected, and Lottie’s growing influence may stem from a need for trust in the post-acute state of the trauma. “Mysticism and the things that come from it can help alleviate that distress about what was unexpected,” he said. “You would kind of want to (make) yourself vulnerable and trust someone else, just to start restoring that interpersonal dynamic,” he said.
Courtney Eaton and Kevin Alves in “Yellowjackets”
Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME
Viewers don’t know much about how the Yellowjackets coped once they were rescued, other than the fact that Lottie was institutionalized by her parents and subjected to electroshock therapy. Treatment varies depending on the individual, but Gibbs said she would likely start with a trauma patient like this by breaking down the events he experienced – such as focusing on the plane crash itself. , the first night, Doomcoming, etc.
“If you do it in big chunks, it overwhelms their system and they shut down,” she explained. “It’s a bit like a traffic jam. If you clear a path, the system can naturally take over a bit and do some of the work to help digest it. Then you do another track, then you digest that, then you do another one – and over time you can really see how the things that were so present and powerfully triggering calm down a bit.
This may be part of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which Gibbs and Szpitalak mentioned explicitly. For stressful situations, Szpitalak highlighted breathing exercises that are often recommended for fear and anxiety because they automatically calm the body.
“If you have a calming breath, you’re going to invite a calming sensation,” she said. “If you can consciously and strategically deepen your breath, breathe deeply from your diaphragm and slow down this process, then you will also invite the corresponding emotion into your system.”
The problem, of course, is that none of the “yellow vest” characters are following typical desert sanity protocol (“I hate it,” Gibbs said) – be it breathing, motion control or keeping a diary of specific incidents and triggers – which makes the psychological toll on their adult selves all the more believable.
Ahead of the series premiere in March, the cast told IndieWire that audiences should be worried about everyone else, and that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.
New episodes of “Yellowjackets” will stream Fridays and on-air Sundays.
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